So you have an e-mail that you need to send to several contacts but you are tired of using the old BCC, and you would really like to personalize the message for each invidivual recipient. This can absolutely be done in MS Word 2007!
An e-mail merge works exactly the same as a standard mail merge except for one major difference. Rather than printing individual letters, envelopes or labels, MS Word 2007 will generate individual e-mails and send them to your MS Outlook 2007 outbox. The next time you are working online in MS Outlook, Outlook will send each of your personalized e-mails to each individual address.
Follow the steps below to learn how:
- Launch MS Word 2007 if it is not already open.
- Key in the text of your e-mail.
- On the Ribbon, click on the Mailings tab.
- In the Start Mail Merge group, click on the Start Mail Merge button, which will show you a list of mail merge options available to you. There are many options but for the purpose of this article, we will select E-Mail Messages.
Now you will need to select the recipients of your mail merge. The names can come from any number of sources, such as an Excel 2007 worksheet or your Outlook Contacts.
- Click on the Select Recipients box in the Start Mail Merge group, or find your data source elsewhere or create a new list.
- If you need to edit any of the recipients in the list, simply click on Edit Recipient List in the Start Mail Merge group.
- Now you must add the appropriate fields to personalize the greeting of your e-mail, the recipient’s name, or add any other data you might like.
- You can find the appropriate fields in the Write & Insert Fields group.
- To add a greeting line, click on the Greeting Line button. The dialog box appears.
- Click OK once you are satisfied with your greeting line.
- You can now preview your results to make sure that everything is the way you want it by clicking Preview Results in the Preview Results group.
- If you are satisfied with what you have done thus far, you can now finish your e-mail merge.
- On the Mailings tab, in the Finish group, click on Finish & Merge.
- Click on Send E-Mail Messages.
MS Word 2007 will now automatically generate all the individual e-mails and send them to your Outlook 2007 outbox.
You can now open MS Outlook 2007 and see your e-mails being sent.
Pretty cool eh?